I called the line for the “day room” at the Halifax Hospital Psychiatric Unit. An unidentified man answered and said, “Okay. Hold on,” when I asked to speak to Kathie Gagne. A few minutes later he returned to the line and said, “She’s talking with her social worker now. Can you call back in like fifteen minutes?” I said I would and then immediately called the -4080 phone number to see if I could talk to Connie Wade and mom at the same time.

Someone named Evelyn, though, told me that Connie was in mom’s room — and not the other way around, as I had assumed — and there’s no phone in mom’s room. I thanked her and hung up.

I called the “day room” line again at 1:30 PM PST and mom answered the phone. We said hello and I asked her if she had been talking to Connie. She said that no, it was a new social worker but she didn’t know who it was.

She said, “I don’t like it here,” and that she had to go.

I asked her if she knew who I was, if she could picture me in her mind, and she said she could. Then she said that she had to go eat dinner and hung up on me.

At 4:05 PM PST I called the “day room” line again and another unknown man answered without identifying himself. When I asked for Kathie Gagne, he said, “Hold on a sec. She might be sleeping.” A few minutes later mom got on the phone. She said, “Hi,” and actually sounded okay at first.

I asked her if she had gotten any cards or letters from me today and she said she had, but when I asked her if it was one of the Snoopy Christmas cards I’d been sending for weeks or if it was just a “regular letter” in an envelope, she couldn’t answer the question. She said, “The last one.” Then I asked her if it was a postcard or a Snoopy card and she said, “It was a card.”

Then she said she had to go to the bathroom.

I said, “Oh, mom. It seems like I can never talk to you,” and she replied, “I can’t do this again,” and then simply walked away from the telephone.

Eventually someone else must have found the phone on the counter and hung it up.

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